Commissioner Alex H. Johnson

Alex lives in Mount Hood Parkdale, Oregon, and is a third-generation Oregon farmer who currently manages timber, dryland wheat, and irrigated pear orchards on both sides of the Columbia River Gorge in Klickitat, Sherman, and Hood River counties. Raised in rural Tualatin, Oregon, on a small filbert orchard, Alex left the state to pursue education and a global perspective, returning a decade later with a BS in Economics from Duke University and lengthy stints in North Carolina, Ireland, New Zealand, Colorado, and Ecuador.

Beyond farming and land management in the Gorge, Alex is currently the Chief Strategy Officer of Virridy, a Colorado-based drinking water delivery, water quality monitoring, carbon finance, and watershed restoration company operating in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Alex is also a Senior Fellow with the American Leadership Forum of Oregon, a Fellow at the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Fellow at Forest Trends Association. He has spent nearly two decades developing and managing energy and environmental markets in the United States. Prior to his role at Virridy, Alex spent 12 years working for The Freshwater Trust in Portland, Oregon, developing watershed restoration programs working in partnership with agricultural producers and water utilities throughout the Western United States. He also served on the Hood River Planning Commission for two years and is a Local Advisory Committee Member for the Hood River Agricultural Water Quality Management Plan.